When most people think of a high-end laptop chassis, they think of titanium, or possibly the brushed aluminum that's currently popular. If Asus' prototype attempts prove successful, however, the next high-end, must-have chassis material on a laptop could be bamboo. At first glance the idea sounds quite odd, but bamboo actually possesses a number of characteristics that could make it suitable for housing a computer.
Bamboo is naturally flexible, durable, and extremely strong; laminates can be applied to the material to shape or strengthen it further. It grows rapidly and abundantly, and could theoretically serve as an ecologically renewable resource for building laptop (and I suppose desktop) chassis. Asus has yet to define the specs on their Eco Book (as the product is called), but the evaluation is ongoing. At present, even if the Eco Book proves successful, it'll remain a high-end option aimed at executives who might otherwise be in the market for a leather-bound or alligator-skin notebook. With bamboo mice, keyboards, and monitor frames already on the market, it's not hard to see where a bamboo laptop might fit as well.
Bamboo-based products may be more eco-friendly and less likely to pollute the environment once the system has been disposed off, but I'd wager that even companies interested in deploying such products would want to conduct aggressive long-term durability tests, first. Consumers would have to be assured that a bamboo laptop wouldn't be more likely to chip, break, or crack than a metallic chassis under similar stress. That might be a tougher sell in Western markets, where bamboo isn't widely used as a building or scaffolding material, but it's certainly possible if manufacturers can create a plausible long-term chassis.